No, they’re a lot more likely to want to force their neighbors into smaller huts in order to provide themselves with a bigger hut.

😀

While I concur with your basic thesis, this comparison is inaccurate, as many before me have noted on the subject.

Love and Hate are both proximately similar emotions, both being based on a somewhat obsessive focus on a single individual, group, or credo. The only distinction really between the two is if the obsession is a positive or negative one.

No, the actual “opposite” of love/hate is apathy: “My lack of interest in the subject/object borders on the supernatural”.

“If it ceased to exist, I would not care. If it was wildly successful, I would not care. As a matter of fact, if no one ever mentioned its existence to me ever again, I would likely never ever waste a fraction of a moment’s thought on it.”

THAT is the true opposite of love/hate.

From http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html:

“In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at http://www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans.”

Trimegistus says exactly how I feel about this:

” . . . attempts to “pathologize” conservatives and conservative ideas [are] very very creepy indeed.”

Very well put!

However, I do not see liberal and conservative as being “set in stone.”

I do believe there was a time when liberal truly meant open-minded and subject to change; whereas nowadays I see so many who call themselves liberal being very set against new ideas. The same was once true of conservative; except it was the opposite.

So, Neo, here’s my question for you:

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan – Did you leave liberalism or did liberalism leave you?

But at the same time I do find myself wondering, because liberalism sometimes looks like a mental illness to me . . .

Any research into the subject would tell you more about the political beliefs of the researchers than the subjects, so perhaps this is a topic we should just agree to drop.